Ruthie BenDor

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm a web designer & developer. This winter, I'll be moving to San Francisco to join Code for America as one of their 2012 Fellows. Right now I'm riding my bicycle from Boston to San Francisco, interviewing web technologists as I go, and blogging at CyclingCoder.com.

My phone is a 32GB iPhone 3GS. Surprisingly, the battery life is still pretty decent. I'm carrying the wall plug and two USB charger cables for it -- one pristine cord to sync with my laptop, and another beat-up cable for connecting it to my solar charger. Yep, solar charger: the Suntactics PC5 solar charger is small, light, rugged, and has some circuitry that automagically compensates for the iPhone's hate for third-party chargers. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks on the road with a cheap pair of Koss KSC75 headphones.

My backup hard drive is a Transcend StoreJet 320GB ruggedized external hard drive. I actually have two of these -- one carried with me for weekly backups, and another sitting in storage with a clone of my hard drive, made the day before I left Boston.

My camera is a Panasonic Lumix GF-2 with a 14mm f/2.5 aspherical lens. I zoom with my feet. The GF-2 is kitted out with a UV filter, a lens cap retainer, and a 32GB class 10 SD memory card. I ditched the original strap and use a binocular harness that lets me chest-mount the camera as I ride. To keep it all charged up, I've got the wall charger and two spare batteries.

To record audio, I carry three mics: a Sony ECM-DS70P stereo mic for recording a roomful of people, an omnidirectional Olympus ME-52W for me to wear, and an Audio-Technica ATR-3350 lavalier mic for my interviewee to wear. My iPhone is my recording device, and I use this adapter to hook up both lapel mics at the same time. I'm also carrying a few spare LR44 batteries for the ATR-3350; the other two mics are unpowered. My fancypants Shure in-ear headphones of unknown model allow me to hear exactly how bad I am at recording audio. (Bad.)

I'm also carrying a no-name 1-gig flash drive, and a Square reader in case someone runs after my bicycle shouting "Wait! Wait! I want to give you money but all I have is a credit card!" Hey, you never know.